The gods have become diseases

--- C G Jung, “Commentary on ‘The Secret of the Golden Flower,’” Collected Works 13, para. 54, cited by  James Hollis in Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up (2005), p. 161; see Alchemical Studies (Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 13)  p. 37

Quote in context:

We think we can congratulate ourselves on having already reached such a pinnacle of clarity, imagining that we have left all these phantasmal gods far behind. But what we have left behind are only verbal specters, not the psychic facts that were responsible for the birth of the gods. We are still as much possessed today by autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians. Today they are called phobias, obsessions, and so forth; in a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer  rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor’s consulting room, or disorders the brains of politicians and journalists who unwittingly let loose psychic epidemics on the world. 

Be kind. Everyone you meet is carrying a big problem.

--- Philo of Alexandria, according to James Hollis in Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up (2005), p. 231

Hollis's citation in context:

If we look hard enough, we will find anxiety, or its management, at the roots of so much we do. It is disconcerting to realize this fact, but in recognition of the ubiquity of anxiety in our lives and in those around us we may feel greater compassion for ourselves and for each other. Philo of Alexandria is reported to have said, “Be kind. Everyone you meet is carrying a big problem.” If we can accept that about ourselves and each other, accept the normality of anxiety, seek the roots of identifiable fears in that anxiety, then simply do the best that we can and forgive the rest, we may at last become less anxious.

Quote Investigator contests the attribution to Philo (or, as often, to Plato).

Rhodes scholars are young men with a promising future hidden somewhere in their past

--- E. T. Williams, Warden of Rhodes House, quoted by Stephen Bergman in his essay "Resistance and the Balliol Revolution: What we dare to do together", The American Oxonian, vol. 99, no. 4, Fall 2012, p. 287

Quote in context:

The Warden of Rhodes House, E. T. Williams, at morning "sherries" in his lair that laid you out wll into the afternoon, soon instilled in us the two rules of the American scholars' trajectory at Oxford. First: "Rhodes scholars are young men with a promising future hidden somewhere in their past"; second: "you Americans spend your first year winding down, and your second year winding back up."

he watched himself as he worked, just to see where his mind would lead him

--- Adrian Searle, about Paul Klee, in Guardian review "Paul Klee at Tate Modern: More! More! More!", 14 October 2013

Quote in context:

I often feel, looking at Klee, that he watched himself as he worked, just to see where his mind would lead him. Working in a spirit both of rigorous formal enquiry and childlike impetuousness and spontaneity, he kept himself guessing as well as us.

Another wonderful passage caught Madelaine Maior's eye:

You need to sidle up to things, let your eye snag on a detail, get sucked in then turn away again, allowing yourself to look while your mind is elsewhere. Being inattentive is as important as close inspection. An art as generative and fecund as Klee's is particularly susceptible to this kind of looking. Just follow your eye.

Beware of people bearing growth percentages and a love of mobile connectivity

--- Chris Duckett, in a ZDNet story Mobile data continues growth, fixed line remains download king,  October 8, 2013

Quote in context:

For proponents of mobile data, the numbers in the latest Internet Activity report from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) tell quite a story — over the 12 months until June 2013, the amount of data downloaded on mobile devices almost doubled. In the year from December 2011 to December 2012, the amount of data increased from 5,000TB to 13,703TB.

Taking these numbers on their own and trumpeting 12-month growth percentages of 169 percent, 174 percent, and 97 percent sounds mighty impressive. Without any sort of wider context, it's easy to see how the ill-informed could fantasise of a world where mobile data trumps existing infrastructure to become the primary and best way to deliver data to the masses.

...

Beware of people bearing growth percentages and a love of mobile connectivity, for only half the picture will often be revealed.

...

 Mobile data may be increasing at a rapid rate, but it is yet to reach one-fifth of the data downloaded on fixed lines in December 2009. By contrast, fixed-line downloads have grown by five and a half times since the end of 2009.

The plural of anecdote is (not?) data

--- Raymond Wolfinger, per email to Fred Shapiro, editor of the Yale Dictionary of Quotations, cited in David Smith, "The plural of anecdote is data, after all" (2011)

I [Shapiro] e-mailed Wolfinger last year and got the following response from him:

"I said 'The plural of anecdote is data' some time in the 1969-70 academic year while teaching a graduate seminar at Stanford. The occasion was a student's dismissal of a simple factual statement -- by another student or me -- as a mere anecdote. The quotation was my rejoinder. Since then I have missed few opportunities to quote myself. The only appearance in print that I can remember is Nelson Polsby's accurate quotation and attribution in an article in PS: Political Science and Politics in 1993; I believe it was in the first issue of the year."

I was led to this quote by a remark of Martin Weiss during his paper presentation at TPRC 2013 on Saturday. It led me to riff during my paper presentation that inside the Beltway, the plural of anecdotes is truth.

Aid is not a solution to poverty; it is a tool that people and governments can use to create solutions to poverty

--- Oxfam America, Introduction to the report, The politics of partnership: How donors manage risk while letting recipients lead their own development, December 2011

In context:

No amount of aid will “deliver” development. Aid is not a solution to poverty; it is a tool that people and governments can use to create solutions to poverty. Aid is ultimately useful to the extent that recipient citizens and governments can use it effectively. Increased efforts by donors to maintain tight control over aid often end up making aid less useful to recipients, and the converse also is true. Genuine partnerships with people and their governments makes aid more effective over the long term. This reality is well known to donors and recipients alike, yet donors consistently find it politically difficult to trust recipients to share in the design and allocation of aid.

No one lies as much as the indignant do

--- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Part Two, The free spirit, section 27, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche (Modern Library Classics), 2000, transl. William Kaufman, p. 229

In context:

Cynicism is the only form in which base souls approach honesty; and the higher man must listen closely to every coarse or subtle cynicism, and congratulate himself when a clown without shame or a scientific satyr speaks out precisely in front of him.

There are even cases where enchantment mixes with the dis gust—namely, where by a freak of nature genius is tied to some such indiscreet billygoat and ape, as in the case of the Abbé Galiani, the profoundest, most clear-sighted, and perhaps also filthiest man of his century—he was far profounder than Voltaire and consequently also a good deal more taciturn. It happens more frequently, as has been hinted, that a scientific head is placed on an ape’s body, a subtle exceptional understanding in a base soul, an occurrence by no means rare, especially among doctors and physiologists of morality. And whenever anyone speaks without bitterness, quite innocently, of man as a belly with two requirements, and a head with one; whenever anyone sees, seeks, and wants to see only hunger, sexual lust, and vanity as the real and only motives of human actions; in short, when anyone speaks “badly”— and not even “wickedly”—of man, the lover of knowledge should listen subtly and diligently; he should altogether have an open ear wherever people talk without indignation. For the indignant and whoever perpetually tears and lacerates with his own teeth himself (or as a Substitute, the world, or God, or society) may indeed, morally speaking, stand higher than the laughing and self-satisfied satyr, but in every other sense they are a more ordinary, more in different, and less instructive case. And no one lies as much as the indignant do.

Living—is that not precisely wanting to be other than this nature?

--- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Part One, On the prejudices of the philosophers, section 9, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche (Modern Library Classics), 2000, transl. William Kaufman, p. 205

Quote:

“According to nature” you want to live? O you noble Stoics, what deceptive words these are! Imagine a being like nature, wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without purposes and consideration, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time; imagine indifference it self as a power—how could you live according to this indifference? Living—is that not precisely wanting to be other than this nature? Is not living—estimating, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different? And supposing your imperative “live according to nature” meant at bottom as much as “live according to life”—how could you not do that? Why make a principle of what you yourselves are and must be?

What you do matters. How you do it is important. Why you do it is critical.

--- Shivam Dhawan, from a slide deck on slideshare.net called D.I.Y. guide to personal branding, slide 59 of 73

If you’re doing research and you know exactly what you’re gonna find, you’re not doing research, you’re doing marketing

--- Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research and founder of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, during a TEDx CERN Talk about how all research — real research, that is — is improbable.

See video at time code 2:15 onwards

All research is improbable. All research is going to turn up some things you really didn’t expect. If you’re doing research and you know exactly what you’re gonna find, you’re not doing research, you’re doing marketing.

We don’t sit to get better. We sit to be with life as it is.

--- Seth Segall, closing line in the blog post, Good Sitting, Bad Sitting, November 23, 2012

From the post:

William and Matthew are at the start of their Zen journey. They’re beginning to learn that sitting isn’t about perfect concentration and bliss, but about seeing the mind as it is — a mirror that reflects everything — including the energies of holidays and far-off conflicts. Thoughts about these ongoing events rise and stir the emotions. The goal is not the elimination of these thoughts and emotions, but developing our capacity to observe them in a kind and interested way. If all that we can observe is how helplessly caught up we are in them — how our minds have a mind of their own — then that, in and of itself, is the beginning of wisdom. We are not the masters of our own house, and learning to work skillfully with the energies at play is the work of a lifetime.

 ...

Sitting is a strange process. In the beginning, it’s hard to grasp what it’s all about. Later on, it doesn’t get much easier. The only thing that’s clear is “just do it.” Whether the sitting is “good” or “bad,” just do it. You never get any better at it. Not really. But this whole idea of “getting better” is part of the problem, the endless self-improvement and self-manipulation game.

Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone

--- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), in the section "Ethics"

A sobering thought for those of us with a sitting practice. The glass-half-full interpretation is that since we're all narcissistic, meditation offers a safe way to indulge this vice.

It is easier to fast than diet

--- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), in the section "The Sacred and the Profane"

In context:

One categorical: it is easier to fast than diet. You cannot be "slightly" kosher or halal by only eating a small portion of ham.

The "slightly kosher" coda actually detracts from the aphorism; it's just a vanilla oxymoron, like "partly pregnant."

It is as difficult to change someone’s opinions as it is to change his tastes

--- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), in the section "Chance, Success, Happiness and Stoicism"

A skeptical counterpoint to Popper's optimism in saying "I may be wrong and you may be right, and by an effort, we may get nearer to the truth" (The Open Society and Its Enemies, Volume II, The high tide of prophecy: Hegel, Marx and the Aftermath, fifth edition (revised) 1996, Princeton University Press, first paperback printing 1971; chapter 24, section I, p. 225)

Taleb provides another perspective later on in the section on "Ethics":

You can only convince people who think they can benefit from being convinced.

What could be more humbling to a fact then to learn that it has been selected for our attention by a metaphor, an image, or a fiction?

--- law professor Pierre Schlag, in blog post Facts (The), 28 January 2013

Lots of good stuff - read the whole post. The quote in context:

Facts are frequently presented as “the-real-story” or “the bottom line.” One is no doubt supposed to conclude from this that “facts are facts”—that they are the veritable bedrock of truth. But notice that this doesn’t make any sense. Notice that the “bottom line” is an accounting metaphor. . . . Now, it’s not that these metaphors, images or fictions turn facts into non-facts. But still, I ask you: what could be more humbling to a fact then to learn that it has been selected for our attention by a metaphor, an image, or a fiction?

"Since its inception radio communication has been plagued by a shortage of space for ever-increasing numbers of stations and new services"

--- Radio spectrum conservation; a program of conservation based on present uses and future needs. A report of the Joint Technical Advisory Committee, IRE-RTMA. New York, McGraw-Hill, 1952. http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/005756597, quoted (slightly tweaked) by Ed Richards in his speech "Spectrum in an age of innovation", 29 November 2011

Quote in context, the opening lines of the Preface of the report:

The subject of this volume is one of far-reaching importance to society at large. Since its inception radio communication has been plagued by a shortage of space for ever-increasing numbers of stations and new services, from ship-to-shore “wireless” in 1902 to television in 1952. As new regions of the radio spectrum have been explored and opened to practical operations, commerce and industry have found more than enough new uses to crowd them.

"Human intuition about what is private is not especially good"

--- privacy researcher Frank McSherry, quoted in a Simons Foundation survey of differential privacy, Privacy by the Numbers: A New Approach to Safeguarding Data by Erica Klarreich, December 10, 2012

Quote in context:

“We’ve learned that human intuition about what is private is not especially good,” said Frank McSherry of Microsoft Research Silicon Valley in Mountain View, Calif. “Computers are getting more and more sophisticated at pulling individual data out of things that a naive person might think are harmless.”

The piece also discusses the exhaustible nature of privacy; a database can only support a finite number of queries before any pre-determined amount of privacy is lost. As McSherry put it, “Privacy is a nonrenewable resource. . . Once it gets consumed, it is gone.”

"Boundaries are border wars waiting to happen"

--- Deborah Stone, Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making (Third Edition, 2011) p. 184-84

Quote in context, from the last two pages of the book

In a world of continua, [conceptual] boundaries are inherently unstable. Whether they are conceptual, physical, or political, boundaries are border wars waiting to happen. At every boundary, there is a dilemma of classification: who or what belongs on each side? In politics, these dilemmas evoke intense passions because the classifications confer advantages and disadvatages, rewards and penalties, permissions and restrictions, or power and powerlessness.

. . .

Boundary tensions mya be the curse of our existence as thiiking and communal beings but political argument is our privelege. It allows us to fight our border wars with imagination and words.

"Telecoms is fundamentally the business of multiplexing for profit"

--- Martin Geddes, in his newsletter 11/22/2012, "Future of Comms - Our crisis of certainty‏"

Quote in context:

What networks do is to translocate information to enable computation to happen. An ideal network does what Turing described: instant and perfect translocation.

Real networks are never ideal.

What real networks do is to lose and delay data, and the only freedom of action they have is to allocate this impairment in more or less damaging ways. Thus whilst we have had a theory of computability for over half a century, we have (thus far) lacked a theory of translocatability.

. . .

Telecoms is fundamentally the business of statistical multiplexing for profit. The infrastructure could be built locally and rented. The services can be provided by “over the top” players. Telcos sit in the multiplexing middle, and mediate between variable instantaneous supply and demand.

"Problem definitions are stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end, involving some change or transformation"

--- Deborah Stone, Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making (Third Edition 2011) p. 158

Quote in context:

In politics, narrative stories are the principal means for defining and contesting policy problems. We don’t usually think of a policy as literature, but most definitions of policy problems have a narrative structure, however subtle. Problem definitions are stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end, involving some change or transformation. They have heroes and villains and innocent victims, and they pit the forces of evil angst the forces of good. Stories provide explanations of how the world works. These explanations are often unspoken, widely shared, and so much taken for granted that we aren’t even aware of them. They can hold a powerful grip on our imaginations and our psyches because they offer the promise of resolution for scary problems.

Stone's footnote to this paragraph cites Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Knopf, 1976).

“A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.”

--- John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Yale Univ Press 2003/1859, p. 113), quoted by Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon 2012) , p. 294
Haidt's context:

In Chinese philosophy yin and yang refer to any pair of contrasting or seemingly opposed forces that are in fact complementary and interdependent. Night and day are not enemies, nor are hot and cold, summer and winter, male and female. We need both, often in a shifting or alternating balance. John Stuart Mill said that liberals and conservatives are like this: “A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.”

According to Haidt, the Mill quote continues: "Each of these modes of thinking derives its utility from the deficiencies of the other; but it is in a great measure the opposition of the other that keeps each within the limits of reason and sanity.”

"efficiency is a political claim, a way of portraying a situation that makes some people or things look more important than others"

--- Deborah Stone, Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making (Third Edition 2011) p. 78

Framing excerpt:

In the library conundrum [taken from Herbert Simon, Administrative Behavior (New York: Macmillan, 2nd ed. 1947), pp. 186-87] that opens this chapter, we saw that efficiency is a political claim, a way of portraying a situation that makes some people or things look more important than others. In the face of many different but equally plausible meanings of efficiency, we should doubt the very possibility of proving that one kind of social system leads to “the greatest good given our collective resources.”

[Efficiency] does not tell you where to go, but only that you should arrive there ... with the least effort

--- Aaron Wildavsky, Speaking Truth to Power: The Art and Craft of Policy Analysis (1979) p. 131 via Deborah Stone, Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making (Third Edition 2011) p. 57

From the text:

Efficiency

Modern man has a deeply rooted belief that objectives should be attained at the lowest cost. Who can quarrel with that? But technical efficiency should never be considered in a vacuum. It does not tell you where to go, but only that you should arrive there (or go part of the way) with the least effort. The great questions are: efficiency for whom and for what? Some goals (destroying other nations in nuclear war, decreasing the living standards of the poverty-stricken in order to benefit the wealthy) one does not wish achieved at all, let alone efficiently. Efficiency, therefore, raises once more the prior question of objectives.

Stress on efficiency assumes agreed-upon objectives. Knowledge of the general welfare, to which the plan is supposed to contribute, turns out to be one of its major assumptions. Without this knowledge, planners would have no legitimacy to tell others what part they should play in this grand scheme.

"We are all in this together; therefore, we must all be responsible" vs. "... we need to help each other out"

--- Robin Niblett, director of Chatham House, a London-based think tank, quoted in CS Monitor  "Is Europe really on the brink" 29 October 2012, page 5.

A fascinating contrast of views of responsibility vs. solidarity, framed here as the German vs. Southern perspectives. The "we must all be responsible" view would be the Conservative response in the US, and "we need to help each other out" would be the Progressive one. From the article:

"There is no conviction yet that Germany is willing to commit to the kind of mutualization of debt that is fundamental to the survival of the euro," says Dr. Niblett at Chatham House. "They define Europe's collective responsibility rather than solidarity. That means: 'We are all in this together; therefore, we must all be responsible,' not, 'We are all in this together, so we need to help each other out.' Making that transition from the former to the latter has not yet happened in Germany."

"If you can simplify what you're here for and who you want to be for people, you can achieve far more than if you insist that life is so complicated"

--- D.T. Max, interviewed by Randy Dotinga, Biographer D.T. Max: getting inside David Foster Wallace's head, Christian Science Monitor 27 September 2012

The quote is from the closing paragraph of the interview:

Q: What can we learn from David Foster Wallace? 

A: He's not a cautionary tale about flying close to the sun. His story is much more about an insistence on never being content with who you are or what you've written.

Here's a guy who could have been a well-known literary author and lived in his little literary persona. Instead, David insisted on trying to reach people in this highly unusual and emotional way and show people, as he does in that Kenyon College speech, that he cares about them and how they live their lives.

For a guy like David who wasn't naturally caring, this shows that you can push the edges of your natural comfort zone in order to reach people.

Another lesson is that often it's the simpler truths that carry you forward, and the complex truths that hold people back. If you can simplify what you're here for and who you want to be for people, you can achieve far more than if you insist that life is so complicated.

"Poor people are poor because they don't get paid much per hour -- not because they don't work hard enough. "

--- Charles Kenny, in an opinion piece in Foreign Policy, November 2012, Work More, Make More?

The opening is wonderful:

Declinists, get ready to fret: Sometime this past summer, the average net worth of Canadians surpassed that of Americans. Adding insult to injury, Canadians have universal health care and a lower unemployment rate too.

But you know what really makes it sting? They barely even worked for it. The average employed Canadian works 85 hours fewer each year than the average American -- more than two full workweeks. And that may be the lesson that Canada has for the United States: Working 24/7 isn't the road to prosperity, much less happiness, and there are numbers to prove it. In fact, across rich countries, it turns out there's no close link between the average hours people put in at the office and how much they make. So go ahead: Take that vacation. 

 And here's the quote in context:

But doesn't working harder make you richer? It's true that at the individual level there is a link between working hard and being paid more. Nearly two-thirds of high-earning U.S. workers surveyed for the Center for Work-Life Policy clocked more than 50 hours a week, and one-third logged more than 60 hours. At the other end of the income scale, of course, many of those in poverty can't find a job to put in the hours at all. It's also true, however, that in many low-income families, parents are working two jobs just to stay above the poverty line. Poor people are poor because they don't get paid much per hour -- not because they don't work hard enough.

“Regulators can resist ideas, but they can’t resist technologies”

--- Mohamed Ali El-Moghazi, PhD student at University of Strathclyde, said during the presentation of his paper World Radiocommunication Conference 12: Implications for the Spectrum Eco-System, TPRC 2012, 22 September 2012

I took this to mean that while regulators may try to reject new policy approaches to protect their perceived interests in the status quo, popular technologies like Wi-Fi devices will inevitably flow across borders, bringing about the new world whether they like it or not.

"I may be wrong and you may be right, and by an effort, we may get nearer to the truth"

--- Karl Popper's characterization of the rationalist attitude, or 'attitude of reasonableness', in The Open Society and Its Enemies, Volume II, The high tide of prophecy: Hegel, Marx and the Aftermath,
fifth edition (revised) 1996, Princeton University Press, first paperback printing 1971; chapter 24, section I, p. 225. Full text on archive.org.

In context:

In order therefore to be a little more precise, it may be better to explain rationalism in terms of practical attitudes or behaviour. We could then say that rationalism is an attitude of readiness to listen to critical arguments and to learn from experience. It is fundamentally an attitude of admitting that ‘I may be wrong and you may be right, and by an effort, we may get nearer to the truth' [italics his]. It is an attitude which does not lightly give up hope that by such means as argument and careful observation, people may reach some kind of agreement on most problems of importance. In short, the rationalist attitude, or, as I may perhaps label it, the ‘attitude of reasonableness’, is very similar to the scientific attitude, to the belief that in the search for truth we need co-operation, and that, with the help of argument, we can attain something like objectivity.

"For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order"

--- Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince and The Discourses, The Modern Library, Random House, Inc., 1950, Page 21, Chapter VI , cited on http://www.design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/Machiavelli.html

Longer excerpt:

It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things.  For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the laws in their favour; and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had the actual experience of it.

Alternative translation from http://www.constitution.org/mac/prince06.htm

And it ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them. Thus it happens that whenever those who are hostile have the opportunity to attack they do it like partisans, whilst the others defend lukewarmly, in such wise that the prince is endangered along with them.

"If you talk all the time about something, you stop knowing anything about it"

--- poet Kazim Ali, writing in “One Whole Voice”, in Poetry magazine February 2012, a series of extracts from A God in the House: Poets Talk about Faith, edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towler, to be published in March 2012 by Tupelo Press.
Excerpt:

I started writing poems about spirituality and religion as a way to grasp what I believed. It might be time for me to keep quiet about this for a while. If you talk all the time about something, you stop knowing anything about it.

“We knowingly build fairy tale models of the future in order to lie with confidence”

--- John Helm, in conversation, 29 June 2012

"Gentleness should not be confused with softness"

--- The Economist's Lexington columnist, in an obituary for Washington bureau chief Peter David, 19 May 2012

From the column:

"Above all, though, he brought to journalism a rare elegance of spirit. In tackling really hard questions, he carefully weighed opposing arguments before the application of reason, guided by strong liberal instincts, led him to a crisp conclusion. The approach, and his personal style, were gentle. But gentleness should not be confused with softness. On some issues, such as Iraq, you could knock against a surprising toughness, like an underwater rock. He stoutly defended his support for George Bush’s invasion in 2003, based on the information that was available at the time, but never shrank from cataloguing the disasters that followed."

"willpower without self-awareness is as useless as a cannon commanded by a blind man"

--- Roy Baumeister and John Tierney, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, Penguin 2011, p. 114

In context:

Our ancestors lived in groups that rewarded members for living up to the common values, norms, and ideals. Therefore, people could adjust their actions to meet those standards fared better than the ones who were oblivious to their own social faux pas. Changing personal behavior to meet standards requires willpower, but willpower without self-awareness is as useless as a cannon commanded by a blind man. That’s why self-awareness evolved as an innate trait among our early ancestors on the savanna – and why it has kept developing recently in more treacherous social environs.

"One advantage afforded by a long life [is] the opportunity to change one’s mind"

--- Ernst Gombrich, art historian, quoted in an obituary by Elizabeth McGrath, cited by Richard Gombrich in What the Buddha Taught (2009) p. 110

McGrath's obituary in The Burlington Magazine, February 2002, p. 113 is quoted as follows by Gombri

While he habitually expressed his views with great firmness, Gombrich liked to remark that one advantage afforded by a long life was the opportunity to change one’s mind.

"Sow an act, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny"

--- Damien Keown, Buddhism: A Very Short Introduction p. 40, quoted by Richard Gombrich in What the Buddha Thought (2009) p. 13

"The Tea Party is driven in large part by concerns about fairness. . . . fairness as karma"

--- Jonathan Haidt, in an interview with Alison George in New Scientist, "What righteousness really means" (pay wall) 8 March 2012, issue 2854, on the occasion of his new book The Righteous Mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion.

Excerpt:

Liberals have difficulty understanding the Tea Party because they think it is a bunch of selfish racists. But I think the Tea Party is driven in large part by concerns about fairness. It's not fairness as equality of outcomes, it's fairness as karma - the idea that good deeds will lead to good outcomes and bad deeds will lead to suffering.

"Prison as a deterrent does not work. If it did, America would be the safest country on earth"

--- The Economist, in a story "Cleaning up the ’hood" about focusing on drug markets rather than users, 3 March 2012.

Quote in context:

Traditional drugs policing targets both users and dealers. This poses three main problems. First, low-level dealers are eminently replaceable: arrest two and another two will quickly take their places, with little if any interruption to sales. Second, it tends to promote antagonism between the police and the mostly poor communities where drug markets are found. Arrests can seem random: only one in every 15,000 cocaine transactions, for instance, results in prison time, but those other 14,999 sales are just as illegal as that one. In some neighbourhoods, prison is the norm, or at least common, for young men. Police come to be seen as people who take sons, brothers and fathers away while the neighbourhood remains unchanged. Third, prison as a deterrent does not work. If it did, America would be the safest country on earth.

"All democracies tend to steal from the unborn since they can't vote"

--- Roger Scruton, in an interview in New Scientist on the occasion of the publication of his new book, Green Philosophy, 7 January 2012

Quote in context:

What role should the state play in [lessening our impact on the planet]?

This is one issue we all worry about, regardless of ideology. Wisely, the American founding fathers held that state powers should be conferred and limited by the people: that is what the Constitution was for. However, even in the US, we now see the state stealing future assets to finance current profligacy. All democracies tend to steal from the unborn since they can't vote. But families and small associations can look to the past and future - and the unborn have a voice. The state should return power to small groups so problems land in the lap of those with a motive to solve them.

"Always true to the truth, no matter what, But never scornful of those who have to lie."

--- C.P. Cavafy, lines in Thermopylae, transl. David Ferry, in Poetry Magazine, vol. 1999, no. 4 (January 2012), p. 292

From the poem (second of three stanzas):

Compassionate, available to pity;

Generous if they’re rich, but generous too,

Doing whatever they can, if they are poor;

Always true to the truth, no matter what,

But never scornful of those who have to lie.

 From some other translations:

George Barbanis: "always speaking the truth, yet without hatred for those who lie."

Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard: "always speaking the truth, yet without hating those who lie."

John Cavafy: "speaking the truth despite all hindrances, without ill-will, however, for the liars."

poemhunter.com: "always speaking the truth, but without rancor for those who lie."

"... to provide intellectual cover for a self-interested policy. (That is the mark of what diplomats call “good principles”.)"

--- The Economist's Banyan columnist, in "Having it both ways: Iran and the gap between theory and practice in Chinese foreign policy", Jan 28th 2012

In context:

China’s stance over Iran, however, is far from clear-cut. It finds itself in a pivotal but acutely uncomfortable position. The simplistic old platitudes in which its foreign policy is couched cannot do justice to the complexity of the calculations it has to make. Most of its foreign-policy principles, says Minxin Pei of Claremont McKenna College in California, are “either obsolete or under pressure”, and Iran is an example of their irrelevance.

They do seem nevertheless to provide intellectual cover for a self-interested policy. (That is the mark of what diplomats call “good principles”.) “Energy security” has long been a priority for Chinese diplomacy. It has underpinned its friendships with other regimes excoriated in the West: pre-division Sudan, for example, or Myanmar’s junta before it donned civilian clothing and gave charm a chance. In Iran, China has longstanding commercial relationships and an important—and cheap—energy supplier. Naturally it wants to avoid antagonising a reliable old friend.

"Puzzles are the gateway drug of the world of mathematics"

--- Matt Parker, opening line of his review of The Puzzler's Dilemma by Derrick Niederman, New Scientist, 25 February 2012

In context:

Puzzles are the gateway drug of the world of mathematics, enjoyed by recreational users and hardcore mathematicians alike. And there is never a shortage of them, from sudoku in newspapers to mind-bending brain-teasers you can find online.

A constant stream of puzzle books is part of this trend. Most of them are just collections of discrete puzzles in a reference-book style, but every now and then someone feels the need to treat the puzzle book like a novel. In creating a narrative they aim to make their book readable in a continuous flow. In The Puzzler's Dilemma, Derrick Niederman has taken on this challenge.

"And the end of all our exploration will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time."

--- T.S. Eliot, quoted by Marcus Chown in his New Scientist review (21 January 2012) of Dimitar Sasselov's new book The Life of Super-Earths: How the hunt for alien worlds and artificial cells will revolutionize life on our planet

Quote in context:

And the results of all this striving? To know ourselves, of course. Only by knowing what is possible, says Sasselov in this inspirational book, can we ever understand how life got going on Earth and why it has the characteristics it has. Sasselov quotes T. S. Eliot: "We must never cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploration will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time."

"There's nothing to forget because there's nothing to remember"

--- 18 year old Wynn Haimer, student at New Roads School in Santa Monica, about Kellman and Wise's "perceptual learning" method, quoted in New Scientist, 27 January 2012, Learning without remembering: Brain lab goes to school

Quote in context:

Perceptual learning, by contrast, does not depend upon explanations of the underlying concepts. Instead, the program used to teach the straight-line equation may flash up a graph and ask which of three alternative written descriptions conveys the same information. Or it may show an equation and ask which of three graphs it describes. After each selection, students are told whether they were right or wrong, and the key elements that define the correct match are highlighted in different colours.

At first, the students may have to guess. But as they progress they attain "mastery" levels and, from time to time, are shown what percentage of answers they got right and how long they are taking, on average, to respond. This feedback seems to tap into the psyche of the video game generation. "It's just fun," says Christopher Allen, another member of the class who found himself trying to answer as quickly as he could. "At the end, the amount of time it took was about a quarter of what it was originally."

Most importantly, as students learned the patterns they gained a deeper understanding without having to make a conscious effort to memorise anything. "It takes on new meaning," says Haimer. "There's nothing to forget, because there's nothing to remember."

Oracles get fulfilled because they are read as warrants to take action to bring about what they prophesy

--- William Ian Miller in Losing It (2011) p. 219

Quote in context:

In Genesis, notwithstanding the Lord telling her in an oracle that the older of the twins in her womb would serve the younger, Rebecca is not about to sit around passively and wait for the Lord to fulfill the oracle. She plots and implements the deception of her old blind husband and the shafting of her first born: she does all the work (25.23, 27.6 13). Oracles get fulfilled because they are read as warrants to take action to bring about what they prophesy.

Good news is dangerous stuff; it is a tax on your remaining supply of good luck

--- William Ian Miller, in Losing It (2011) p. 90

Quote in context:

Suppose, though, your good fortune does buy you happiness: you have no complaints. Yet you must complain. Your continued happiness hinges on your fulfilling the complaint requirement. Happiness uncomplained about provokes the gods, and surely the evil eye of your neighbors. Thus the Yiddish “no evil eye” (kein erin harah), upon hearing good news. Good news is dangerous stuff; it is a tax on your remaining supply of good luck. Best to protect against the harmful consequences of good luck and ward oil the demons by knocking on some nearby wood. Beware, too, the envy of your neighbors. it is one of mankind’s most predictable traits to find as much cause for complaint in another’s good fortune as in one’s own misfortune. The former being experienced as a special case of the latter. In a world in which one’s standing is gauged relative to others and the competition is fierce, your good fortune costs your neighbors. They will, unless you go out of your way to make their envy less painful to them, plot to make your happiness painful to you. As the Bemba proverb says: “To find one beehive in the woods is good luck, to find two is very good luck, to find three is witchcraft.” If your luck is too good to be true, it might cost you your life.

Do not be overrighteous, neither be overwise — why destroy yourself?

--- Ecclesiastes 7:16, via William Ian Miller's Losing It (2011), p. 65

Miller's gloss:

Proverbial wisdom is prudent rather than heroic: discretion tends to trump valor. You do not count chickens before they hatch, you do not go looking for tights or get stuck in a web of deceits. (A carefully planned single deceit is fine, but webs are hard to manage.) The wise are constantly wary of the ubiquitous wicked, with their lies and snares, who always seem vastly to outnumber the righteous, among whom you are unsure whether to include yourself, for it sometimes takes tire to fight fire. Ecclesiastes is even more cynical: “All things have I seen in the days of my vanity: there is a just man that perisheth in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man that prolongeth his life in his wickedness. Be not righteous over much: neither make thyself over wise: why shouldest thou destroy thyself?” (7.15—16). Be good and wise in modest doses or you are either dead meat or have just wasted your time.

And as with age his body uglier grows, / So his mind cankers.

--- Prospero, The Tempest, Act IV, Scene 1. The epigraph to William Ian Miller's Losing It  (2001)

Quote in context, referring to (?) Caliban:

Prospero: A devil, a born devil, on whose nature
Nurture can never stick; on whom my pains,
Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost,
And, as with age his body uglier grows,
So his mind cankers. . . .

“If you think that you can think about a thing inextricably attached to something else without thinking of the thing which it is attached to, then you have a legal mind.”

--- widely attributed to Thomas Reed Powell, early 20th Century legal thinker; via Pierre Schlag's blog post "Law School Exam Last Minute Help" December 6, 2011

"Listen to the questions posed by philosophers but don’t be distracted by their answers"

--- Christof Koch, from Chapter 20, "An Interview" (fictitious) in The quest for consciousness: a neurobiological approach, Roberts & Company, 2004,  p. 316-17 (hardback)

Interviewer: What, then, is the role of philosophers in your quest for a scientific theory of consciousness?

Christof: Historically, philosophy does not have an impressive track record of answering questions about the natural world in a decisive manner, whether it’s the origin and evolution of the cosmos, the origin of life, the nature of the mind, or the nature-versus-nurture debate. This failure is rarely talked about in polite, academic company. Philosophers, however, excel as asking conceptual questions from a point of view that scientists don’t usually consider. Notions of the Hard versus the Easy Problem of consciousness, phenomenal versus access consciousness, the content of consciousness versus consciousness as such, the unity of consciousness, the causal conditions for consciousness to occur, and so on, are fascinating issues that scientists should ponder more often. So, listen to the questions posed by philosophers but don’t be distracted by their answers. A case in point is the philosopher’s zombie.